Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

So you’ve started a website and now have an abundance of traffic coming in. That’s great! But where are these people coming from? How are they finding your site? And most importantly, how are they behaving when they’re on your site? This is where the importance of web analytics comes into play.

Web analytics is the study of how your site’s visitors behave. This includes the tracking of important statistics such as unique vistis, pageviews, bounce rates and conversion rates. For many small sites, the last two statistics are not as important, but for large sites or online businesses, the last two play a key roll in optimizing your site’s performance.

There are two main web analytics technologies: server logfile analysis and page tagging.

Server logfile analysis involves the reading of log files on a server in order to collect analytics data. During the early days of the Internet, server logfile analysis only tracked the number of requests made by a visitor to the web server. This was commonly know as a “hit” and was logical since many sites only consisted of a single HTML file at the time. As more elements were added to web pages (images, multiple pages, etc.), server logfile analysis became impractical, as it would count every server request on one page as a “hit”.

These complications led to the creation of new web analytic metrics: pageviews and visits. A pageview was defined as a request to the web server for a single page while a visit was defined as a series of requests from a single person that ended after a certain time frame. Eventually, cookies were used to track unique user sessions due to the evolution of proxy and dynamic IP technologies, which made the old “visit” statistic fairly useless.

Some of the most popular software programs for tracking web analytics use the server logfile analysis method. These include Webalizer, Urchin, WebTrends and the open-source AWStats.

Page tagging involves the placement of code on a page in order to track analytics data. The earliest form of page tagging was the website counter. These visible, numeric counters eventually evolved into invisible snippets of JavaScript. The small JavaScript code would be placed on a page and send data back to an analytics program or company for analysis. Just like the server logfile analysis method, page tagging also involves assigning cookies to each user in order to determine unique visitors.

One of the most popular page tagging analytics programs is Google Analytics. The service is free to anyone with a Google account and is the standard in web analytics for any person or company on a tight budget.

So why should you worry about web analytics? So you can increase the performance of your website of course!

Why do people leave your site? A “bounce” is when a visitor leaves your website after only viewing one page. Many analytics programs have a statistic called bounce rate, which measures the percentage of people that commit a “bounce”. This metric allows you to see which pages on your site are performing poorly and then make improvements or adjustments to that page. This statistic is extremely important for e-commerce sites or sites that would like a visitor to commit a certain action.

How much time do people spend on your site? This is known as session duration and is important to know because it allows you to see what pages on your site have content that is compelling your visitors to stay. It will also let you know what pages need additional content added in order for visitors to stay on them longer.

Allthough you may feel like it is impossible to get listed high in Google’s search engine result page, believe it or not that is not Googles intention. They simply want to insure that their viewers get the most relevant results possible. In fact, they’ve even created a program just for webmasters to help insure that your pages get cached in their index as quickly as possible. They call the program Google Sitemaps. In this tool, you’ll also find a great new linking tool to help discover who is linking to your website.

To Google, these two pieces in the top 10 SEO tips would be to read the tutorial entitled How Do I Create a Sitemap File and to create your own. To view the one on this page, website simply right-click this SEO Tips Sitemap.xml file and save it to your desktop.

Effective 11/06, Google,  Google, and MSN will be using one standard for sitemaps. Below is a snippet of the standard code as listed at Sitemaps.org. Optional fields are lastmod, changefreq, and priority.

MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS) based on SQL (Structured Query Language). First released in January, 1998, MySQL is now one component of parent company MySQL AB’s product line of database servers and development tools.

Many Internet startups became interested in the original open source version of MySQL as an alternative to the proprietary database systems from Oracle, IBM, and Informix. MySQL is currently available under two different licensing agreements: free of charge, under the GNU General Public License (GPL) open source system or through subscription to MySQL Network for business applications.

MySQL runs on virtually all platforms, including Linux, Unix, and Windows. It is fully multi-threaded using kernel threads, and provides application program interfaces (APIs) for many programming languages, including C, C++, Eiffel, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Tcl.

MySQL is used in a wide range of applications, including data warehousing, e-commerce, Web databases, logging applications and distributed applications. It is also increasingly embedded in third-party software and other technologies. According to MySQL AB, their flagship product has over six million active MySQL installations worldwide. Customers include Cisco, Dun & Bradstreet, Google, NASA, Lufthansa, Hyperion, and Suzuki.

The optimal keyword density doesn’t appear to have changed but rather appears to have declined in value altogether. Sites with low keyword densities are starting to appear more often for phrases based more on their links than their content and also overall site relevancy.

While the importance of a specific keyword density on a page has declined, this has been countered by an increasing importance of relevancy throughout the site. Google is opting to assign relevancy based more on the overall content of the site rather than a single page. General directories will be showing up less and less in exchange for topic-specific directories. Additionally, sites with a central theme carried throughout the majority of pages will tend to rank over sites with a specific page or even section on a topic.

Internal links are carrying a solid weight in attaching relevancy to specific internal pages. Properly worded internal links, preferably built into the content of your site (see note on natural links above) will add weight to those internal pages and increase the likelihood of those pages ranking for specific secondary phrases.

Similar to the history of your site, the history of the links to your site have gained importance. As was noted in Google’s patent application #20050071741 titled, “Information retrieval based on historical data,” links, like sites, gain weight over time. This point was further clarified in the latest update as sites with longstanding links gained strength while sites with many new links did not see significant ground gained. The “sandbox” on links is functioning in fractions in that after a period of time a link will gain part of it’s weight, after a bit longer, it will gain more, etc. (the exact length of time is of course a closely guarded secret by Google and likely changes as their algorithm does). This means your link building today won’t create any substantial effect on your Google rankings until months down the road.

Additionally, the relevancy of links to your site is still important however Google’s ability to determine relevancy appears to have improved. Pages no longer have to containing the exact keyword phrases to be relevant but rather have to be from related industries. For example, a link to an SEO site from a web design site would be considered relevant even though the keywords on the page are not specifically related to SEO.

Natural links have gained weight over unnatural links. Links that are contained within content areas of a page will be weighted more strongly that links that appear alone or in a directory-style (like reciprocal links pages) as they are considered more natural. When you are having links built to your site try to get them placed within the content (within the description portion of your reciprocal link for example). Also, in link building you will want to insure you’re varying the terms of your anchor text. Creating hundreds of links with identical anchor text will quickly be detected as a link building effort (i.e. not natural) and thus will carry little weight. Different anchor text for your links will appear more natural and thus will have a more positive impact on your rankings.

One of the things I’m constantly amazed at is how many web publishers miss one of the easiest ways to maximize their positioning in Search Engines by simply including the keywords that they’d like to be found for in their post titles.

I spend a lot of time looking at online articles written on blogs, newspapers and websites and some days it seems that every second or third one has a title that is either cryptic, clever or cute at the expense of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

To put it bluntly - when it comes to blog SEO I believe that your page and post titles are incredibly important. Google in particularly seems to value the words in your title incredibly highly.

Whilst I too feel the temptation to be clever with my post titles from time to time (and sometimes give into it) - I know that if I don’t get traffic from search engines then a fairly significant part of my income will disappear.

So if you’re writing about a new ‘Pink Widget’ have a think about the words that a potential reader will use to search for in Google to find the information you’re presenting. How would you search the net for information on ‘Pink Widgets’?

Without a doubt we’d all include ‘pink widget’ in the search we did. We might refine it by including a third word like ‘price’, ‘review’, ‘advice’, ‘problems’ etc (which may be worthwhile words to include either in the title or body of content) but the best words to include in the title are ‘pink widgets’ - if you don’t you’ve got virtually no chance of being found for that search term unless no one else is writing about them.

Keep in mind that research shows that people search the web a lot for names of products and people and that they are often quite specific their searches. If you’re writing about something specific make your title reflect this.

Of course it’s worth saying that it’s not as simple as just stuffing your titles with keywords - for one they need to make sense (no one will click on a link in Google if its a collection of unrelated words), secondly if you put too many words in your title you run the risk of decreasing their power and confusing the search engines and thirdly you’ll disillusion your regular readers if you mess with stuffing titles with too many words.

* AOL Search - A Google powered search engine used by AOL users also pulls listings from the Open Directory Project.
* AltaVista - the Internet’s first Web Index, has very comprehensive coverage and a wide range of power searching commands, which make it a particular favorite among researchers. It gets its listings from Yahoo! Search.
* All The Web - uses results from Yahoo! Search plus an index of tens of millions of pdf and doc files.
* Ask.com - (formerly Ask Jeeves) is a human-powered search service that attempts to direct you to the exact page that answers your question. If it fails to find a match within its own database, then it will provide web pages from their search engine.
* Excite - A popular web portal (a page that, in addition to search, includes news, sports, weather, email and much more) on the web. Excite uses a metasearch engine that searches Google, Yahoo and Ask listings.
* Google - Currently the most popular search engine, makes heavy use of link popularity as a primary way to rank web sites. This can be especially helpful in finding good sites in response to general searches such as “cars” and “travel,” because users across the web have in essence voted for good sites by linking to them.
Google is also known for a wide range of features including: cached pages, excellent spell checking, access to dictionary definitions, stock quotes, street maps, telephone numbers and more. The Google Toolbar is also very popular.
* HotBot - has advanced search features and presents listings from either Ask.com or MSN and the Open Directory Project
* LookSmart includes past and popular searches right on their home page. They also have a pay per click advertising program.
* Lycos - another web portal offers “personalized content” including free email, websites, blogs and photo sharing. They include listings from the Open Directory Project. A good looking site.
* MSN Search - Microsoft’s MSN web portal also offers free email, instant messenger, and a directory. It previously used Looksmart for its search results but now provides access to Yahoo’s listings.
* Netscape Search - Netscape Search’s results come primarily from Google and the Open Directory Project.
* Open Directory Project - Uses volunteer editors to catalog the web. It was acquired by Netscape in November 1998, and the company pledged that anyone would be able to use information from the directory through an open license arrangement. Netscape itself was the first licensee. Lycos also uses the information for its main service and within Lycos-owned HotBot. Here’s more information about Open Directory.
* Search.com - A metasearch engine owned by CNET, that searches Google, Ask.com, LookSmart and dozens of other leading search engines to bring you the best results.
* Snap - An innovative search company that offers previews of websites in search listings.
* WebCrawler is a metasearch engine that combines results from Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com. They also offer a toolbar with Dictionary Search that you can download.
* Yahoo! Search - Once the web’s most popular search service is still a good alternative to Google. Yahoo is the oldest major web site directory, having launched in late 1994.

Search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. Search engines crawl through the web. Search engines eventually find your site and index the pages they find. Page titles, body text (ie, great content), META tags and other elements all play a role in what gets indexed. People then review the results of what was found by the search engine, based on keywords they type into the search engine.

A directory such as Yahoo! Directory depends on human editors to create its listings. You submit a description of your site to the directory for editors to review. A good site, with good content, will be more likely to get reviewed than a poor site. A search of a directory looks for matches only in that directory’s index.

Yahoo! also has a search engine that includes spidered websites along with their directory listings and “Sponsor Results” which are pay per click ads, similar to Google’s Adwords. Originally Yahoo! displayed only listings from their directory. Then in 2002 they added search engine listings from Google. In 2004 they started using their own search engine based on AltaVista’s technology. A few years later they acquired Overture (formerly GoTo) which was the first pay per click program.

Incorporating keywords into your site’s headlines and body copy is key to your search results. For Google to read your words, they can’t be rendered as a graphic or embedded in a Flash element. How often should you repeat your keyword? Our advice is to not overdue it. Write naturally, but train yourself to use fewer pronouns.

The Page Description is a short blurb or summary of your web page found in the metadata. Google often uses the first 20-25 words of this description below your site name in search results. As with the Page Title, Google will bold the words that match the user’s search terms.